[CentOS] [Semi-OT] Advice on large webmail setup

Thu Feb 15 16:16:21 UTC 2007
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Jure Pečar wrote:
> 
>> *shudder*  That may be so in terms of performance, but what about 
>> reliability and longevity?  Given RH's treatment of non-ext3 FSs (and 
>> reiserfs's murky future in general), I'd be *very* hesitant to use 
>> reiserfs for anything.
> 
> As long as your hw is ok, reiserfs works (>=2.4.18, dont know about 2.6). When you get a noncorrected bitflip in memory, it tends to propagate down to fs and make a nonnoticeable or huge disaster, depending on where it lands. That's true for all filesystems, see:
> http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/iron-sosp05.pdf
> 
> Solaris10 ZFS is immune to that thanks to its cheksumming.

I think it is a lot to ask from a filesystem to fix memory errors that 
already happened in the buffer space before writing it out and I don't 
have a lot of faith in that really working.

Anyway the 'old-school' way of handling a lot of mail users was to use a 
NetApp filer with whatever number of mail servers you needed for the 
user load doing NFS mounts and using maildir format to minimize the 
locking issues.  It should still be a sure bet.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com